Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (26 page)

Without a genealogical study of the Sickert family—which could only be obtained by an exhumation of his mother or one of Sickert’s siblings—we will never be able to say without a doubt what Walter Sickert’s mitochondrial DNA profile was, any more than I can say what Montague Druitt’s, the Duke of Clarence’s, Whistler’s, or Sickert’s wife Ellen’s was because we lack standards for comparison. Suffice it to say that the mitochondrial DNA recovered from Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper envelopes and stamps could have been left by the same person. The data are at least inclusionary but certainly not conclusive.

Although DNA is a forensic tool that shines brighter than a supernova these days, it is not the only scientific or circumstantial evidence that can convict or exonerate a suspect. That fact seems to be overlooked if not entirely forgotten when contemplating some criminal cases. In the Jack the Ripper murders, the most convincing forensic evidence is not the DNA but the forensic paper comparisons.

The Openshaw (i.e., Ripper) letter that yielded the single-donor mitochondrial DNA results was written on A Pirie & Sons stationery. The letter is postmarked October 29,1888, mailed in London, and reads:

ENVELOPE:

Dr. Openshaw Pathological curator
London Hospital
White chapel

LETTER:

Old boss you was rite it was the left kidny i was goin to
hopperate agin close to your
ospitle just as i was goin
to dror mi nife along of
er bloomin throte them
cusses of coppers spoilt
the game but i guess i wil
be on the job soon and will
send you another bit of
innerds Jack the ripper
O have you seen the devle
with his mikerscope and scalpul
a lookin at a Kidney
with a slide cocked up

One reason I believe this letter is genuine is that it is so blatantly contrived. The bad handwriting looks disguised and is jarringly inconsistent with the handwriting of someone with access to pen and ink and fine-quality watermarked stationery. The address on the envelope is literate, the spelling perfect, which is vastly different from the overblown illiteracy of the letter with its inconsistent misspellings, such as “kidny” and “Kidney,” “wil” and “will.” Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner point out in their extremely helpful book
Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell
that the postscript in the Dr. Openshaw letter alludes to a verse in an 1871 Cornish folktale:

Here’s to the devil,
With his wooden pick and shovel,
Digging tin by the bushel,
With his tail cock’d up!

An allusion to a Cornish folktale makes no sense if we are supposed to believe this Openshaw letter was written by an uneducated homicidal maniac who ripped a kidney from a victim and sent it off in the mail. Walter Sickert visited Cornwall as a boy. He painted in Cornwall when he was Whistler’s apprentice. Sickert knew Cornwall and the Cornish people. He was well read and was familiar with folk tunes and music-hall songs. It is unlikely that a poor, uneducated person from London spent time in Cornwall or sat around in the slums reading Cornish folktales.

One could argue—and should—that the absence of a reliable known reference source, in this instance Walter Sickert’s DNA, suggests we are assuming without conclusive scientific evidence that the single-donor sequence from the Openshaw letter was deposited by Walter Sickert, alias Jack the Ripper. We can’t assume any such thing.

Although statistically the single-donor sequence excludes 99 percent of the population, in Dr. Ferrara’s words, “The matching sequences might be a coincidence. They might not be a coincidence.” At best, we have a “cautious indicator” that the Sickert and Ripper mitochondrial DNA sequences may have come from the same person.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A PAINTED LETTER

W
alter Sickert was a forensic scientist’s worst adversary. He was like a twister tearing through a lab.

He created investigative chaos with his baffling varieties of papers, pens, paints, postmarks, and disguised handwritings, and by his constant moving about without leaving a trail through diaries, calendars, or dates on most of his letters and work. He fooled everyone. But some of what he did would get him into serious trouble today. I believe his letters would be his downfall and get him caught.

A Ripper letter received by the police on October 18, 1889, is on an 11-by-14-inch sheet of azure laid foolscap writing paper, the lettering first drawn in pencil, then beautifully painted over in brilliant red. Apparently no one thought it unusual that a lunatic or an illiterate or even a prankster would elaborately paint a letter that reads:

Dear Sir

I shall be in Whitechapel on the 20th of this month—And will begin some very delicate work about midnight, in the street where I executed my third examination of the human body.

Yours till death
Jack the Ripper
Catch Me if you can

[postscript at the top of the page]

PS

I hope you can read what I have written, and will put it
all
in the paper, not leave half out. If you can not see the letters let me know and I
will
write them biger.

He misspells
bigger
as an illiterate would, and I don’t believe the glaring inconsistency in a letter such as this one was an accident. Sickert was playing one of his little games and showing what “fools” the police were. An alert investigator certainly should have questioned why someone would correctly spell
delicate
and
executed
and
examination
and yet misspell the simple word
bigger.
But details that seem obvious to us now have the benefit of hindsight and the analysis of art experts. The only artist looking at those letters then was the artist who created them, and many of the Ripper letters are not letters at all, but professional designs and works of art that ought to be framed and hung in a gallery.

Today, as was the case a hundred years ago, science cannot solve crimes without the human element of deductive skills, teamwork, very hard investigation, and smart prosecution. Had we gotten an irrefutable DNA match of a Sickert and a Ripper letter, any sharp defense attorney would say that Sickert’s writing a letter or two or even a dozen doesn’t prove he murdered anyone. Perhaps he simply composed a number of Ripper letters because he had a wacky, warped sense of humor.

A good prosecutor would counter that if Sickert wrote even one of those Ripper letters, he was in trouble, because the letters are confessional. In them, the Ripper claims to have murdered and mutilated people he calls by name, and he threatens to kill government officials and police. Unlike deranged individuals who make false confessions to police, the Ripper’s confessions do not change to reflect the most recent details in the news. Indeed, the Ripper ridicules news accounts when they are wrong, according to him, and in some instances he goes on to correct details, such as the various physical descriptions and supposed social status of the Ripper himself.

If Sickert’s flaunting of his artistic skills in Ripper letters would raise a detective’s eyebrow today, one can be assured that the paper evidence Sickert left would be considered of great importance. In fact, were Sickert a suspect now—assuming the police were well versed in modern forensic science—his paper trail would lead to him.

To date, three Ripper letters and eight Sickert letters have the A Pirie & Sons watermark. It seems that from 1885 to 1887, the Sickerts’ 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery was A Pirie, and was folded at the middle like a greeting card. The front of the fold was bordered in pale blue, the embossed address also pale blue. The A Pirie & Sons watermark is centered on the crease. In the three Ripper letters, the stationery was torn along the crease and only half of the A Pirie & Sons watermark remains.

Unless Jack the Ripper was incredibly stupid, he would have removed the side of folded stationery that was embossed with the address. This is not to say that criminals haven’t been known to make numbskull over-sights, such as leaving a driver’s license at a crime scene or writing a “stick-up” note on a deposit slip that includes the bank robber’s address and Social Security number. But the Ripper did not make fatal errors during his lifetime.

He also did not believe he would ever be caught. Sickert must not have been worried about the artwork or watermarks on the Ripper letters he wrote. Perhaps this was another “catch me if you can” taunt. More likely, he was too arrogant to think paper or crude cartoons would matter—and he was right. The A Pirie & Sons watermarks we found on Sickert stationery include a watermarked date of manufacturing. The three partial dates on the Ripper letters with the A Pirie & Sons watermark are 18 and 18 and 87. The 87, obviously, is 1887.

Repeated trips to archives turned up other matching watermarks. Letters Sickert wrote to Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1887 are on stationery with the address embossed in black, and a Joynson Superfine watermark. A search through the Blanche-Sickert correspondence in the Institut Bibliothèque de L’Institut de France in Paris shows that during the late summer and fall of 1888 and in the spring of 1889, Sickert was still using Joynson Superfine paper with the return address of 54 Broadhurst Gardens either embossed with no color or in bright red with a red border.

Letters Ellen wrote to Blanche as late as 1893 with a 10 Glebe Place, Chelsea, return address are on stationery that also has the Joynson Superfine watermark. In the Whistler collection at Glasgow, there are seven Sickert letters with the Joynson Superfine watermark, and it would appear that Sickert was using this stationery about the same time he was using A Pirie & Sons.

In the Sir William Rothenstein collection at Harvard University’s Department of Manuscripts, I found two other Sickert letters with the Joynson Superfine watermark. Rothenstein was an artist and a writer, and a trusted enough friend of Sickert’s that the latter felt comfortable asking him to lie under oath. During the late 1890s, Sickert had become friendly with a French woman named Madame Villain, a fishwife in Dieppe he referred to as “Titine.” For £5 a quarter, he rented a small space in her house for his bedroom and studio. Whatever the nature of his relationship with Titine, his living with her would have been used against him in court had he contested Ellen’s divorce suit, which he did not. “If subpoenaed,” he wrote to Rothenstein in 1899, during the divorce, “you might truly remain as you are in ignorance of Titine’s very name. You might say I always call her ‘Madame.’” Rothenstein was not ignorant of Titine. He knew very well who she was.

Both Joynson Superfine watermarked letters that Sickert wrote to Rothenstein are undated. One of them—oddly, written in German and Italian—is on stationery that must have belonged to Sickert’s mother because the return address is hers. A second Joynson Superfine watermarked letter to Rothenstein, which includes mathematical scribbles and a cartoonish face and the word
ugh
, has a return address of 10 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which is the same return address on Ellen Sickert’s 1893 letter to Blanche. In another letter to Rothenstein, Sickert draws childish, round cartoon faces that resemble a cartoon face on a postcard the Ripper wrote to James Fraser of the City of London Police Office (undated, but probably the fall of 1888, because the postcard taunts police about “Poor Annie,” or the murder of Annie Chapman).

There is a Ripper letter at the PRO with a partial Joynson Superfine watermark. It would appear that Sickert used Joynson Superfine watermarked paper from the late 1880s through the late 1890s. I have found no letters with this watermark that date from after his divorce in 1899, when he moved to continental Europe.

As these watermarks continued to turn up, Tate Britain suggested I consult with Peter Bower, one of the most respected paper experts and paper historians in the world, to see what he had to say about paper comparisons between Sickert and Ripper letters. Bower is a frequent expert witness in court, and is perhaps best known for his work on the papers used by artists as various as Michelangelo, J. M. W. Turner, Constable, and others—as well as for determining that the Ripper diary is a fraud. Bower points out that matching watermarks do not always mean the paper was from the same batch.

When trying to ascertain a match, he uses a 30X lens to study the measurements, fiber content, and distances between chain lines, among other features. When paper is manufactured by machine, as A Pirie & Sons and Joynson Superfine were, and the paper comes from one batch, this means that each sheet of paper came from the same roll. Another batch produced from a different roll of paper can have the same watermark and a very similar fiber content, but the individual sheets of paper may have slight differences in measurements due to the speed of drying or the way the machine cut it.